Forever
by Eunoia
Summary: He has lost the ability to see each moment in the context of infinity.  Time is like a drum beat in his ear.  What if Rose hadn't been sucked into the void in Doomsday?  How would she change?  How would the Doctor?


_Disclaimer: I do not own these characters or situations. Written for fun and not profit._

_Author's Note: I always wondered how Rose would change if Doomsday had ended differently. Here's my interpretation._

"I made my choice a long time ago," she says and she's Rose and she's stubborn as an ox, and frankly, he's known all along that there were two levers, so that was that. She had made her choice, and he had already known it and he loved her for it about as much as he hated himself. He had made her this person who could zap herself without hesitation away from her family and everything she had wanted for the first nineteen years of her life. She had made her choice and when the void closes, it's just the two of them and a white wall that would seem endless to him had he not known what endless was. She doesn't cry, just briefly trails her fingers along the wall and that's when he knows that he's dealing with a different Rose now, a slightly different animal. He takes her hand and pulls her away because he knows this kind of loss and he knows to run away.

She's still Rose of course, still laughs in the face of danger, still comforts a stranger in the middle of an attack by The Army of the Six-Horned antelope, still makes him seek out a chip shop in 1920s New York. But there's a trace of something else underneath it, something hard and unflinching and inhuman. Something all too familiar. When he makes the hard choices now, she never questions him, just looks resolved. When he truly thinks about it, he wonders if that hadn't started long before Canary Wharf.

They don't get back to her time for so long that they're no longer sure when her time is. He tries to offer, but she just shrugs and says "What's the point?"

"You don't want to go home?" he asks, and there are a million other questions under that one, but she just smiles with her mouth more than her eyes, runs her hand down the Tardis, and says that she is.

Time blurs and blends and dips and he has that nagging feeling that he gets, the one that he forces down every time she refers to Forever. But he pushes Time back and says "Not yet, not yet." The laugh lines around her eyes stay long after a laugh ends and then one day they're locked in the Tower of London and one of the other prisoners tells them it's his birthday. He asks her how old she is and she says only that a lady never reveals her age, but he can read the furrow of her brow like a book and knows that she can't remember. She's legally dead and has no age and Time whispers in his ear menacingly.

He wants to let her go, to make it hurt less when the inevitable comes, to be responsible and give her the opportunity for a real life. That's what the Time Lord in him tells him. But he's spent too much time with humans and there's another side that's selfish and lonely and tells him that she's his best friend and he needs her. And eventually the time to make decisions for her is gone. She's his partner, plain and simple, and when her hand is in his, they move like a single entity. He knows he has done wrong. He doesn't care enough.

Her hair is streaked with silver now, and he has to half-drag her when they run. When she loses her pinky finger to the guard dog at the Arch Duke of Raxicoricophalapatorious's palace, she doesn't cry, just grits her teeth while he solders the wound. Later that night, he holds her other hand in his and asks in a voice he hasn't used on her in a long time whether she wouldn't like to slow down a bit.

"You're not leaving me behind," she says, "Not like Sarah Jane. I'll find you. I have before and I'll do it again." And that is the end of that. She never asks him if he would be willing to slow down with her, and he's grateful because it means he doesn't have to think about whether he could or not. He doesn't know which possibility would scare him more.

He has lost the ability to see each moment in the context of infinity. Time is like a drum beat in his ear.

She cannot be that old, not really, but their lifestyle does not have a long lifespan and he wishes he could have let her go years before. Before he needed her. No matter how their time together ends, it will be he who killed her. He doesn't know how to tell her this, any of it, so finally he takes her home. They sit in the door of the Tardis and watch the remains of Gallifrey swirl around them. She turns to face him and he sees that she no longer fears any part of him. She kisses him then. He stops her, tells her it is not something that he does, but she simply tells him that it is now. That things change. For the first time in what he knows is not a long time but feels like forever, he lets them.

They never talk about the future, not usually, but she knows he has shown her something new here, something difficult. There is no better time to ask him for a promise. "Anything," he says and grins and it's a truth and a lie all in one.

"Promise me," she says, "promise me you'll find someone to take care of you."

"Rose," he admonishes, but she shushes him.

"Promise me you'll love her just like you love me?" she asks and he hears the tears catch in her throat for the first time in years. He's never told her he loved her, not once. Always thought love, the kind she meant, was for people who believed in Forever. But maybe that didn't need to be. Maybe loving her right now, this much, was enough.

"_That_ would be impossible," he says.

She laughs and says "Six before breakfast, remember."

That is when he stands and hauls her to her feet. "Why not?" he asks. "How about six impossible things and then maybe we'll have a cup of tea."

"And pancakes?" she asks hopefully, and she hasn't forgotten the gravity of their conversation. Oh, quite the contrary. But she's his partner and his other half and she understands about running and she understands about living and she understands about right now.

They park the Tardis in the catacombs of Paris and he takes her hand. He takes her hand in his and, for the moment, they outrun even time.


End file.
